One of the few constants in life is that Twitch chat is a mess. The circumstances and intensity vary, but sooner or later someone will wander in, say something wildly offensive, and then refuse to go away quietly. One way to avoid that, and I do it too, is to close the chat window the moment you enter the stream. But that's not an option for viewers looking for community, nor is it good for streamers who want to build community.

Late last week, Twitch quietly announced some changes to their system. Rather than simply silencing them, blocked users will be removed from their followers, channel banners will be removed from the channel list altogether, and in a separate tweet, Twitch said that banned users will not be visible to anyone on the channel, nor will they be able to see ongoing chats--they will not be able to see the banning process. They made it clear that they will be completely blocked.

Blocked users are treated similarly: Blocked users are treated similarly. Blocked users cannot refollow, whisper, send friend requests, host streams, or purchase gift subscriptions.

As N3rdfusion CMO Devin Nash (via Kotaku) noticed, Twitch also takes steps to crack down on ban evasion by shadow banning the IPs of banned users. This means that messages posted from alt accounts created by banned users are not actually seen by anyone.

Twitch also announced yesterday a new "Mod View" for channel moderators. The command-based mod functionality has been replaced by standalone widgets that can be moved and resized to suit each user's needs. Less frequently used widgets can be docked, and there is a dedicated space for moderators to find and explore user details and history.

Being a community moderator is no easy task: there will always be people trying to cause trouble, and they will always figure out how to do it, so anything that can simplify the task of keeping a lid on things is a welcome change. Twitch is working on more widgets and new improvements to the AutoMod feature are underway, he said.